Muslims

Fox News contributor Erik Rush complains in his latest column at World Net Daily that he was only joking when he said that Muslims are evil and should be killed. But he manages to prove otherwise by closing the column with a justification for killing Muslims:

For the record, I still maintain that Islam is, by its nature, wholly incompatible with Western society. I analogize liberalism, which is promoting this dhimmitude, to Stage 3 cancer in America’s body politic. For the record: While killing people is definitely undesirable, that is what war tends to be about.

And we are at war – just study the history of Islam, or ask any Islamist.

We reported on the exchange, and it was quickly picked up by other media outlets. Rush accuses us and others of “leaving out the fact that it was sarcasm.” Rush claims that Bill’s “irate” tweet prompted his “sarcastic response,” and that “kill them all” was merely echoing Muslims’ “favored disposition toward Americans.”

Rush deleted the tweet later that day and rolled out his sarcasm defense, which numerous outlets uncritically parroted. We didn’t buy it then, and we certainly don’t buy it after reading Rush’s latest column.

Rush has a long track record of paranoid and hate-filled rhetoric. The “just kidding” defense doesn’t work when you’ve previously called for armedrevolution against President Obama, said that liberals and journalists should be jailed for treason and claimed that the Chinese government is building a military baseinside the US with help from Obama.

It’s clear that Rush supports the sentiment behind his “sarcastic” tweet. The onus was on him to prove otherwise. Not only has he failed to do so, he’s doubled down with a justification for killing Muslims.

Until now, Rush has enjoyed a close relationship with Fox News, and Sean Hannity in particular. A transcript search reveals that he’s appeared on Fox nearly 20 times and has made additional appearances on Fox News Radio, as recently as last Friday. Hannity’s website even features a review for Rush’s book, with the catchy name of Negrophilia.

Despite this close relationship, representatives of Fox News scrambled behind the scenes this week to distance the channel from Rush. If they don’t want their precious brand to be tainted by him, they need to cut ties with him entirely. We have a petition calling on Fox to do so, which has already been signed by more than 50,000 people.

It is not every day that you hear a conservative commentator go off on an extended rant about how the war in Iraq was a colossal waste and total failure, but that is exactly what Bryan Fischer did today on his radio program.

According to Fischer, there is one, and only one, metric by which the success of the war can be judged and that was whether or not the US left behind a nation which protected religious liberty for Christians. And based on that one measurement, Fischer declared the Iraq war to be a monumental failure for which the US has absolutely nothing to show.

In fact, said Fischer, Christians actually had it better under Saddam Hussein because he realized that he could only trust Christians to help him run the country because all the Muslims were liars and thieves. But when Hussein was toppled, the protection for Christians vanished and now they have been left at the mercy of "a spirit of darkness, a spirit of death, a spirit of tyranny, a spirit of despotism, a spirit of terror" that is Islam.

Finally, Fischer declared that since Muslims hate liberty and freedom, the next president must declare that not one dollar will be spent to rebuild Muslim nations because doing so is a waste of American blood and treasure:

Rick Joyner and Lou Engle have been working to promote The Call: Detroit, 11-11-11, a prayer rally whose central goals will include the conversion of American Muslims to Christianity. In their latest series of interviews, Joyner said that the burgeoning Muslim community in Michigan, particularly in the cities of Detroit and Dearborn, represents a “Sign of the Times,” a reference to the Last Days before the Second Coming. Joyner claimed that the state’s Muslim community may try “to make Michigan our first Muslim state.” Engle responded that The Call will help bring Muslims “dreams of Jesus.”

Joyner: One of the things Detroit has become known for in our nation is the largest Muslim community in our nation, and Dearborn, it’s growing. Many havesaid there actually is an attempt to make Michigan our first Muslim state.... You cannot understand our modern world today without understanding Islam, and the Lord called them hypocrites who did not know the Signs of the Times. We need to know and understand this issue, we have to. And Islam is in our face, everywhere we return. And here, in America, this is the one place where it is most in our face, right now.

…

Engle: At 11-11-11 the Lord just clearly showed to us, you got to pray all night long because it’s when the Muslims sleep and all over the world right now Muslims in the night are having dreams of Jesus, we believe that God wants to invade with His love Dearborn with dreams of Jesus. We’re gathering together to say God, pour out your grace and revelations of Jesus all over Dearborn and the Muslim communities of North and South America. I think it’s a crisis moment and a critical moment together to pray concerning this issue.

You really have to feel for Herman Cain because it seems that people are always misunderstanding his perfectly consistent and reasonable statements.

Like how his 9-9-9 plan will not raise taxes on the poor because he has a super-secret solution that he just hasn't told anyone about or how just because he said he wouldn't allow any Muslims to serve in his administration, that doesn't mean he wouldn't allow Muslims to serve in his administration.

Yesterday Cain made news again after saying that it is not the "government’s role, or anybody else’s role" to make the decision about whether to have an abortion in cases of rape or incest.

That, of course, was not the end of the story because it directly contradicted what Cain had just said. So now Cain is out there trying to set the record straight by explaining that he believes that abortion ought to be illegal in all circumstances ... but that the decision to break the law and get an abortion is none of the government's business:

FOX HOST MARTHA MACCALLUM: Do you believe that abortion should be legal in this country for families who want to make that decision [to abort]?

CAIN: No. I do not believe abortion should be legal in this country, if that's the question.

MACCALLUM: So then you're saying that if those circumstances come up and the family does make that decision, that they decide that that is the best thing for this young person or she decides that on her own, then if that's what they decided, then it would be an illegal abortion that they would seek.

CAIN: It would be an illegal abortion! Look, abortion should not be legal -- that is clear -- but if that family made a decision to break the law, that's their decision.

In attempting to clarify his position, Cain has done the opposite and is only generating more confusion.

If the government outlaws abortion, then obviously a decision about whether to break the law and get an abortion anyway is not a situation where the government "shouldn’t try to tell them what decision to make for such a sensitive decision" ... mainly because the government has already made that decision for them by outlawing abortion.

Is this really Cain's position: that in situations where a family was deciding whether or not to break the law, it is none of the government's business to tell them what to do?

Here is helpful tip for Cain to consider: if people are repeatedly asking you to clarify your incoherent positions and your clarifications only induce further confusion, then just maybe it is not everyone else that is woefully misinformed.

During an interview with Piers Morgan on Wednesday, Herman Cain ignited controversy by stating that homosexuality is a choice and presenting an incoherent view on abortion: that he is against abortion rights but that “it’s not the government’s role or anybody else’s role to make that decision.” In the same interview, Cain also repeated his claim that he never said he’d ban Muslims in his administration if elected president:

Morgan: You got into hot water about the whole issue of Muslims in a potential cabinet.Cain: Yes.Morgan: And you have kind of flip-flopped a bit. I think you would concede, you've backtracked, haven't you?Cain: Well, you media people call it flip flopping.Morgan: What would you call it?Cain: I call it explaining the intent of my comment.Morgan: Back tracking.Cain: You either flip-flop or backtrack. It's either all or nothing.Morgan: Initially, it appeared to be that you were saying you wouldn't feel comfortable, your words, with having a Muslim in a cabinet.Cain: Exactly. And this is an example of where I spoke to quick because I'm thinking about extremists, not all Muslims. I do recognize there are peaceful Muslims and there are extremists. At the moment that I was asked that question, I wasn't thinking about peaceful Muslims.

Cain was referring to an interview with Think Progress in which he first said that he “would not” be comfortable with appointing a Muslim to his Cabinet. But it wasn’t a one-time comment. Almost a month after the Think Progress interview, Cain doubled down, telling the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer, “I wouldn't have Muslims in my administration.” While Cain told Morgan that he regretted that he “spoke too quick” about Muslims, he took the exact opposite approach in his interview with Fischer, complimenting himself for not caring what the media and even his own campaign staff thought about his ban on Muslims:

Cain: I have been upfront, which ruffles some feathers, but remember Bryan, being politically correct is not one of my strong points; I come at it straight from the heart and straight from the way I see it. And the comment that I made the become controversial, and that my staff keeps hoping will die, is that I wouldn't have Muslims in my administration. And it's real simple: the Constitution does not have room for sharia law. I want people who are going to believe and enforce the Constitution of the United States of America. And so I don't have time, as President of the United States, to try and screen people based upon their religious beliefs - I really don't care what your religious beliefs are, but I do know that most of the people of the Muslim faith, they believe in sharia law. And to introduce that element as part of an administration when we have all of these other issues, I think I have a right to say that I won't.

It is becoming abundantly clear that we could never parody Bryan Fischer if we tried because he is constantly dreaming up absurd claims that we couldn't even begin to match in our wildest imagination.

On his radio program yesterday, Fischer was discussing his view that every voter must have a religious test for candidates running for office, which was prompted by the dust-up over Mitt Romney's Mormon faith at last week's Values Voter Summit.

During the discussion, Fischer defended Robert Jeffress' right to his "sincerely held religious belief" that Mormonism is a cult ... which then somehow morphed into an assertion by Fischer that Christians are really the victim here because it is the Mormon church which believes that Christians are a cult:

If somebody is true to their Mormon faith - I mean, if they're devout - Mormonism, they believe, restored the church of Jesus Christ. It was gone, it disappeared, all the church was corrupt, there was no representation of the Gospel of Christ. This was Joseph Smith, he said "I talked to God about it. He said 'don't join any churches; they're all corrupt, they're all gone; my church is not here on planet Earth; you and you alone can restore my original church.'"

So, as far as devout Mormons are concerned, the entire history of Christianity, the entire church is one big ginormous cult, if they're going to be honest about their own faith and about their own religion. So if anybody's out there saying something is a cult, it's the LDS Church!

[M]aking concessions to Sharia law over against the moral code of the Judeo-Christian tradition is nothing new for America. We started doing it in 1619 when we began to tolerate the slave trade, as the first shipment of 30 African slaves arrived on the shores of Virginia ... The slaves who were brought here in chains in 1619 were Africans who had been kidnapped by other Africans and sold to slave traders who in turn brought them to America. The kidnappers, the ones who went into the interior of Africa to capture their fellow Africans to sell them into bondage, were predominantly Muslims.

...

Now, in contrast to Islam and Sharia, the Judeo-Christian tradition from day one has been adamantly opposed to the slave trade ... Moses flatly prohibited the slave trade under penalty of death. “Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death” (Exodus 21:16). In other words, if a strictly biblical code had been followed in 1619, the slave trader who brought that ship to Virginia would have been arrested the moment he landed, prosecuted and hung by the neck until dead. The slaves on board would have been returned to their families and their homelands, and slavery would never have gained a foothold in the United States.

But sadly, we made our first concession to Sharia law in 1619 instead of being guided by the wisdom of Scripture, and we have paid a terrible price for it. Slavery became our first national sin, as abortion is today ... So if the early colonists had followed either the Old or New Testaments, the slave trade would have been treated as criminal behavior from the very beginning, and America never would have been plagued with all the myriad evils that slavery and racism have brought to our land.

This morning on the Today Show Mitt Romney and Chris Christie repeated their call for Rick Perry to disassociate himself from pastor Robert Jeffress because of the pastor’s denigration of Romney’s Mormon faith. Yesterday, Christie even compared Jeffress to “those folks in New Jersey who disparaged in both parties my decision to appoint a Muslim judge” and said that any “campaign that associates itself with that type of comment is beneath the office of President of the United States, in my view.”

“Mitt Romney is right to criticize his rivals for silently standing by and accepting bigotry,” said Michael Keegan, President of People For the American Way. “Now it is time for him to apply those standards to his own campaign. The truly courageous position for Romney to take would be to stand up against religious bigotry of all stripes – including the GOP’s increasingly prevalent scapegoating of American Muslims.

“Romney endorser Jay Sekulow’s American Center for Law and Justice has suggested that devout Muslims cannot become true citizens of the United States. Sekulow himself has perpetuated the debunked claim that the Constitution is under a threat from Sharia law and was a leader of the extremist backlash against the building of an Islamic community center in lower Manhattan, including overseeing the ACLJ’s lawsuit attempting to stop the community center’s construction.

“Last weekend, Mitt Romney called Sekulow a ‘treasure.’ If Romney wishes to show that he is a true champion of the American values of religious freedom and tolerance, he must apply the same standard to his own endorsers as he does to those of Rick Perry.”

But Sekulow isn’t the only anti-Muslim activist in the Romney camp.

Walid Phares was recently named a foreign policy adviser to Romney. As the Council on American Islamic Relations pointed out in a letter [pdf] to Rep. Peter King, Phares has close ties to a Lebanese militiamen and even served as an official in a militia that was “implicated, by Israel’s official Kahan inquiry and other sources, in the 1982 massacre of civilian men, women and children at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon.”

Phares also claims [pdf] that “jihadists within the West pose as civil rights advocates, interested solely in the ‘rights’ of their immigrant communities” in order for their “institutions [to] fall into their hands,” and warns of the “spread of Wahhabism” through Muslim infiltration of “the U.S. armed forces and ultimately even into the Pentagon.”

While Romney was willing to call out Jeffress and Fischer over their intolerant rhetoric, it is uncertain if he will apply that standard to his own campaign.

In a sermon earlier this year called “What to Say to Those Who Are Gay,” Jeffress cited a study from the Netherlands to bolster his argument that gays are incapable of having long-term, monogamous relationships. As Jim Burroway notes, the study of gay men in Amsterdam was conducted in the 1980s and the 1990s and was far from representative of the gay community as it “was heavily weighted with HIV/AIDS patients, excluded monogamous participants, was predominantly urban, and consisted only of those under the age of thirty.” Furthermore, study participants didn’t have the right to marry since marriage equality wasn’t enacted in the Netherlands until 2001.

Myth number five: homosexuals enjoy the same kind of healthy monogamous relationships as heterosexuals. Ladies and gentlemen, the idea of long-term, monogamous homosexual relationships is a myth. According to a study in the Netherlands, one of the most gay-tolerant nations in the world, they discovered that the average duration of a homosexual relationship is 1.5 years. Now while I high percentage of heterosexual married couples remain faithful to each other, homosexual couples - the same study revealed - engage in a high degree of promiscuity.

This study concluded that among committed homosexual couples - not just transitory couples, but committed homosexual couples - among them they had an average of eight different sexual partners a year outside of their relationship.

It is a myth that homosexuals engage in the same kind of monogamous healthy relationships as heterosexuals.

There is a concerted effort to try to call normal what God has called abnormal, and it is a process, a well-thought out process, that has been wildly successful. Dr. Charles Socarides is the head of psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York he’s also the president of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality. I have no idea if he’s a Christian or not but I picked up a paper he had written describing the brilliant plan of gay activists to normalize the abnormal practice of homosexuality using the same brainwashing techniques that had been used by the Chinese for hundreds of years. And in his paper he talks about the three stages that are being used by gay activists to cause our culture to embrace rather than reject homosexuality, and I’ve listed those three brainwashing techniques on your outline today.

First of all, Dr. Socarides says the first technique in brainwashing is to desensitize, desensitization, the desensitization of the public to homosexuality by showing people that homosexuals are “just like everyone else.” If you can laugh with smart, articulate gays like the character on TV’s ‘Will & Grace,’ or if you can be made to sympathize with homosexuals who are being persecuted like the character, lawyer dying of AIDS that Tom Hanks portrayed in the movie ‘Philadelphia.’ If we can laugh with them, if we can cry with them, then immediately we become intoxicated with this idea that ‘they’re nothing to be frightened by, we don’t need to be repulsed by homosexuals, they are just like us.’ Desensitization.

The second step, in the brainwashing activity, is jamming, that is, causing the public to feel guilty of their bigotry toward homosexuals. How do they make us feel guilty about our bigotry toward homosexuals? What they do is they portray in a stereotypical way anybody who’s against homosexuals as being shrill, being uneducated, as being bigoted in their beliefs, and then showing them being shunned by society. Isn’t that how the media portrays those that are against homosexuality? They’re uneducated, they’re shrill, and they’re being shunned by mainstream society, and a person watching that on television says, ‘My gosh, I don’t want to be like that!’ That’s jamming.

And then the third stage in the brainwashing technique Dr. Socarides says, is conversion, during which masses of people change their attitudes about homosexuality in a planned psychological attack in the form of propaganda fed to the nation via the media. Have you noticed how the television airwaves are being flooded right now by programs that celebrate homosexuality? Homosexuality is being crammed down our throats and being presented as a normal, alternative lifestyle.

Last Friday, Rev. Robert Jeffress, the Dallas pastor who introduced Gov. Rick Perry at the Values Voter Summit, spoke derisively about the Mormon faith of Mitt Romney, making the case that “Mormonism is a cult.” Two days later, he chided Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism as “false religions.”

Last year, Rev. Jeffress said the Roman Catholic Church was the outgrowth of a “corruption” called the “Babylonian mystery.” He continued, “Much of what you see in the Catholic Church today doesn’t come from God’s word. It comes from that cult-like pagan religion. Isn’t that the genius of Satan?”

Catholic League president Bill Donohue offered these remarks today:

Where did they find this guy? When theological differences are demonized by the faithful of any religion—never mind by a clergyman—it makes a mockery of their own religion. Rev. Jeffress is a poster boy for hatred, not Christianity.

During a 2008 debate with Jay Sekulow of the American Center of Law and Justice, who endorsed Mitt Romney’s last presidential bid, Robert Jeffress said that not only are Mormons like Romney not Christians but that America would suffer God’s judgment if a Mormon were elected President.

At the 2008 debate, arguing that Christians are “indwelt by the Holy Spirit of God” and “uniquely favored by God,” and therefore favored in public office, Jeffress said that Mormons, along with Hindus and Muslims, “are following after false gods.” Jeffress warned that “God always judges a nation that has a ruler who introduces false gods into that national life.”

The value of electing a Christian goes beyond the public policies that he or she may enact. We believe that a genuine Christian has a relationship with God, is indwelt by the Holy Spirit of God, is led by the spirit of God, and is uniquely favored by God. Even if that genuine believer does not embrace every position we hold important we still believe that we make a grave mistake in underestimating the value of having a Christian in office.

…

Followers of Mormonism, Hinduism, Islam, they’re not worshiping the same God in a different way. We believe they are following after false gods. And as Christians, we can look at the Bible and see very clearly that God always judges a nation that has a ruler who introduces false gods into that national life.

It’s that time of year again when anti-Muslim activists discuss the growing threat of halal foods. WorldNetDaily has published yet another exposé into the “march of Sharia” through the “growth of halal foods,” quoting American Family Association spokesman Bryan Fischer as an authority on the matter. Fischer, who has called American Muslims a “toxic cancer” on society and wants the U.S. to deport all Muslims, implied that the availability of halal foods is an illustration of “creeping” Sharia law:

Specialty markets first supplied "halal" food to Muslims in America, then restaurants joined in the effort and now the very grocery stores from which you buy hamburger and chops are offering food that has been slaughtered according to Islamic ritual, according to responses from food outlets contacted by WND.

Islam requires Muslims to eat such "halal" food, which as part of the religion's rituals already has been dedicated to the Muslim god Allah.

And it's an alarming issue for Christians because the Bible warns against eating food previously dedicated to idols. Mark Biltz of El Shaddai Ministries in Bonney Lake, Wash., has explained in previous WND reports that eating food that's "halal" would be the same as disregarding the Bible's commands.

"From the Christian standpoint, Allah would be an idol," Biltz told WND earlier.

…

But Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association also has expressed alarm.

"To see where things are going with this whole halal business, look no further than the U.K., where grocers have gone whole-hog – pardon the expression – on offering halal meat but without telling anybody about it.

"Shariah law is no longer creeping up on us. It's bearing down on us at full gallop. It's time for Christian civilization to grab the reins of this runaway horse and stop it dead in its tracks. No Shariah law in America, period."

Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association broadcast his radio show today from Washington, where he is attending this weekend’s Values Voter Summit. Fischer spoke with Family Research Council senior fellow Peter Sprigg about how gays and lesbians should simply suppress their sexual orientations, with Fischer saying that his anti-gay outlook represents a “more noble view of humanity” than the worldview of gay rights advocates. Sprigg went on to say that “in terms of their identity, we as Christians believe that every human being is born in the image of God, and to be born in the image of God is a far higher and better thing than for anyone to be born gay”:

The New York Times piece goes on to say “The conference, from Friday to Sunday in Washington, is sponsored by the Family Research Council, the American Family Association” that would be us, “and other evangelical Christian groups. It aims to energize social conservatives and test the fidelity of the candidates.” All true. “The conference planners have obliged Mr. Romney, scheduling him to speak right before Bryan Fischer, who is chief spokesman for the family association and is known for his strident remarks on homosexuality, gay rights, Muslims and Mormons.” Now again, when you just tell the truth, that’s all I’ve done, I’ve done nothing but tell the truth about homosexuality, about gay rights, about Muslims and Mormons. That’s all I’ve done. I didn’t make anything up; I have just told the truth. You tell the truth as far as the left is concerned, that makes you strident. In fact my comments, my speech, is gonna be followed by a panel of same-sex marriage opponents. And then the New York Times guy talks about People For the American Way calling on especially Mr. Romney to publicly disassociate themselves from Mr. Fischer and his quote “unmitigated bigotry.” So once again, tell the truth, as far as the left concerns, “unmitigated bigotry.”

Yesterday on American Family Radio’s Today’s Issues, anti-Muslim activist Pamela Geller argued that progressives are embracing Sharia law in the same way they purportedly venerated Stalinism and Nazism. Geller argued that the Nazi Party was actually a creation of the left, and that liberals now want to impose Sharia law in the same way they backed Nazism. Geller is far from the first person to bizarrely claim that liberalssupportSharia law or claim that Nazism is a “far-left” ideology. As we’ve previously noted, fascists in fact see the political left as their archenemy, and “national socialism” denotes an exclusionary, ethnic-supremacist state that rejects racial, cultural and religious diversity.

Geller: I’m concerned with the political side of Islam, the sharia, Islamic law, and the left. The left, the battle has always been individualism versus collectivism, people are confounded by the alliance of the überleft and the stealth jihadists and I don’t think it’s surprising at all. We see that the left always adopts whatever totalitarian ideology there is of the day, if it wasn’t Stalinism it was communism, if it wasn’t communism it was national socialism, which was Nazism it was not a far-right but a far-left ideology. What the attraction is in Islam my feeling is that the sharia, Islamic law, is the most, if it’s into the control of the people if that’s what you’re into, then there is no more effective way to control the people, there is no more effective system of governance than the Sharia.

Earlier this week, we here at People For the American Way called on the Republican presidential hopefuls who are scheduled to speak at the upcoming Values Voter Summit to denounce the unmitigated bigotry of the American Family Association's Bryan Fischer.

We singled out Mitt Romney because he is scheduled to speak directly before Fischer on Saturday and Fischer has recently begun asserting that the First Amendment does not apply to any "non-Christian religions," including Mormonism.

Given that Romney is going to be directly preceding Fischer on stage at the Values Voter Summit, you'd think that he might have something to say regarding Fischer's extreme views - but today the New York Times' Erik Eckholm took note of our effort and reached out to the Romney campaign for a statement and, not surprisingly, the Romney camp has so far refused to comment:

The liberal advocacy group People for the American Way has called on the presidential candidates, and especially Mr. Romney because he will share a stage, to publicly disassociate themselves from Mr. Fischer and what it called, in a statement on Wednesday, his “unmitigated bigotry.” The Southern Poverty Law Center has made similar appeals to the candidates.

...

Mr. Fischer has stood out for his harsh statements on his daily radio show, likening gay rights advocates to domestic terrorists, arguing that gay men and lesbians should be barred from public office and repeating the far-fetched theory that homosexuals built the Nazi Party. He has said that American Muslims should be banned from the military and that Mormons, let alone Muslims, should not enjoy First Amendment protections because these are reserved for true Christians.

“If Mitt Romney wants to appeal to mainstream audiences, he should publicly disassociate himself from Fischer’s bigotry before handing him the podium,” said Michael Keegan, president of People for the American Way.

The Romney campaign did not immediately comment on the call to distance the candidate from Mr. Fischer.

This weekend, nearly every major GOP presidential candidate, along with the top two Republicans in the House of Representatives, will speak at the Values Voter Summit, an annual gathering of the leaders of the movement to integrate fundamentalist Christianity and American politics.

The candidates – Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich – and the congressmen – House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor – will join a who’s who of the far Right at the event. The organizers of the Values Voter Summit and many of its prominent attendees are on the frontlines of removing hard-won rights for gay and lesbian Americans, restricting women’s access to reproductive healthcare, undermining the free exercise rights of non-Christian religions and breaking down the wall of separation between church and state.

In perhaps the starkest illustration of how far even mainstream Republican candidates are willing to go to appease the Religious Right, Mitt Romney is scheduled to speak immediately before the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer, a man whose record of hate speech should be shocking by any standard. Along with regularly denigrating gays and lesbians, Muslims, and other minority groups, Fischer has no love for Romney’s Mormon faith. In a radio program last week, Fischer insisted that Mormons have no right to religious freedom under the First Amendment and falsely claimed that the LDS Church still sanctions polygamy.

The following is a guide to some of the individuals with whom the leaders of the GOP will be rubbing shoulders at the Values Voter Summit this year.

Bryan Fischer

Bryan Fischer is the Director of Issues Analysis at the American Family Association, which is a sponsor of the Values Voter Summit. Fischer acts as the chief spokesman for the group and also hosts its flagship radio program, Focal Point, on which he has interviewed a number of prominent figures including Bachmann, Gingrich, Santorum and Mike Huckabee.

On his radio program and in blog posts, Fischer frequently expresses unmitigated bigotry toward a number of minority groups, including gays and lesbians, Muslim Americans, Native Americans, low-income African Americans and Mormons.

said that the anti-Muslim manifesto of the right-wing Christian terrorist who killed dozens in Norway was “accurate.”

At a speech at last year’s Values Voter Summit, Fischer said that if Christians don’t get involved in politics, they “make a deliberate decision to turn over the running of the United States government to atheists and pagans.” Of the gay rights movement, he warned, “We are going to have to choose, as a nation, between the homosexual agenda and freedom, because the two cannot coexist.”

Tony Perkins

Tony Perkins is president of the Family Research Council, the main organizer of this weekend’s summit. Perkins leads the group’s efforts against gay rights, abortion rights and church/state separation.

The FRC famously expressed its hostility to religious pluralism in a 2000 statement blasting a Hindu priest who was invited to give an opening prayer in Congress: "[W]hile it is true that the United States of America was founded on the sacred principle of religious freedom for all, that liberty was never intended to exalt other religions to the level that Christianity holds in our country's heritage…. Our Founders … would have found utterly incredible the idea that all religions, including paganism, be treated with equal deference."

denied that there was a correlation between anti-gay bullying and depression and suicide, saying instead that gay and lesbian teens know they are “abnormal” and “have a higher propensity to depression or suicide because of that internal conflict";

Retired Army Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin sparked a controversy when, as a high-ranking official in the Bush Defense Department, he framed the War on Terror as a holy war against Islam. He has since built a career as a Religious Right speaker, specializing in anti-Muslim rhetoric and anti-Obama conspiracy theories. Boykin rejects religious freedom for American Muslims, claiming that Islam “is not just a religion, it is a totalitarian way of life.” In an interview with Bryan Fischer, he called for “no mosques in America.”

Parker is a long-time Religious Right activist who is particularly active in anti-gay and anti-abortion rights work. As Washington, DC was poised to legalize marriage equality, Parker warned that it would lead to more HIV infections in the city, which would “ transform officially into Sodom.” In a recent radio interview with Tony Perkins, Parker mused that black family life was “ more healthy” under slavery than it is today and has accused liberals of treating Justice Clarence Thomas and Gov. Sarah Palin like runaway slaves. She has called legal abortion a “genocide” on par with slavery and the Holocaust.

Along with his fierce opposition to LGBT rights, Jackson has compared legal abortion to “lynching” and urged the Senate to defeat Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court because she is not a Protestant (Kagan is Jewish). Jackson has even described his political efforts in apocalyptic terms, telling a Religious Right group before the 2010 elections, “God is saying to us ‘I want to pick a fight in which I can wipe out my enemies and cause them to be silenced once and for all.’ This is where America is; if we do not recognize and repent, we are going to see our way of life destroyed as we now know it.”

Lila Rose

Rose is the anti-choice activist responsible for carrying out a deceptive hit job against Planned Parenthood this year. Members of Rose’s group, Live Action, went to Planned Parenthood clinics around the country posing as clients seeking help with a child sex trafficking ring. Planned Parenthood alerted the FBI about the activity, and the one staffer who handled the supposed traffickers inappropriately was promptly fired. Nevertheless, Rose claimed that her hoax proved “beyond a shadow of a doubt that Planned Parenthood intentionally breaks state and federal laws and covers up the abuse of young girls it claims to serve.”

Until Beck’s Fox News program was canceled earlier this year, he was one of the Right’s most visible fear-mongers and conspiracy theorists. When his violent rhetoric inspired some real threats against progressive leaders, he laughed off the critics who urged him to choose his words more responsibly. Beck’s elaborate conspiracy theories include the idea that socialists and Islamists were planning a global caliphate, with the help of American progressives; an obsession with the progressive funder George Soros, at whom he leveled a number of anti-Semitic smears including a personal attack that the Anti-Defamation league called “horrific”; and a distrust of President Obama, who he once said was “racist” with a “ deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture .”

On air, Beck joked about killing prominent progressives (for instance, poisoning Nancy Pelosi’s wine), but frequently insisted that it is progressives who were urging violence, even predicting his own martyrdom. In one 2010 broadcast, he warned that "anarchists, Marxists, communists, revolutionaries, Maoists" have to "eliminate 10 percent of the U.S. population" in order to "gain control."

After a terrorist in Oslo killed dozens of young members of Norway’s Labor Party at an island summer camp, Beck attacked the victims , comparing the camp to “Hitler Youth” and calling it “disturbing.”

Jerry Boykin brought his anti-Islamactivism to "Wallbuilders Live" and made a real impression on David Barton, who urged listeners to find out where every candidate running for office stands on the issue of Sharia, even the dogcatchers:

David Barton: You got to elect people who will preserve the culture of the United States and not change the culture.

Rick Green: Which means asking tough questions o the candidates and not just the ones that are going to Congress, or the president, but the local guys too because they're going to deal with some of these issues ...

Barton: Well, that's the farm team. We need to ask the dogcatcher what he thinks about Islamic stuff because he may become the mayor, which may become the state rep, who may become the state senator, who may become the US rep who becomes the US senator who becomes the governor who becomes the president.

I mean, take care of these guys at the lowest level. Talk to every local official, I don't care what they are, get their position and find out where they are and, if they're wrong on it, keep them out of office.

Muslims Posts Archive

Fox News contributor Erik Rush complains in his latest column at World Net Daily that he was only joking when he said that Muslims are evil and should be killed. But he manages to prove otherwise by closing the column with a justification for killing Muslims:
For the record, I still maintain that Islam is, by its nature, wholly incompatible with Western society. I analogize liberalism, which is promoting this dhimmitude, to Stage 3 cancer in America’s body politic. For the record: While killing people is definitely undesirable, that is what war tends to be about.
And we are at war... MORE

It is not every day that you hear a conservative commentator go off on an extended rant about how the war in Iraq was a colossal waste and total failure, but that is exactly what Bryan Fischer did today on his radio program.
According to Fischer, there is one, and only one, metric by which the success of the war can be judged and that was whether or not the US left behind a nation which protected religious liberty for Christians. And based on that one measurement, Fischer declared the Iraq war to be a monumental failure for which the US has absolutely nothing to show.
In... MORE

Rick Joyner and Lou Engle have been working to promote The Call: Detroit, 11-11-11, a prayer rally whose central goals will include the conversion of American Muslims to Christianity. In their latest series of interviews, Joyner said that the burgeoning Muslim community in Michigan, particularly in the cities of Detroit and Dearborn, represents a “Sign of the Times,” a reference to the Last Days before the Second Coming. Joyner claimed that the state’s Muslim community may try “to make Michigan our first Muslim state.” Engle responded that The Call will help... MORE

You really have to feel for Herman Cain because it seems that people are always misunderstanding his perfectly consistent and reasonable statements.
Like how his 9-9-9 plan will not raise taxes on the poor because he has a super-secret solution that he just hasn't told anyone about or how just because he said he wouldn't allow any Muslims to serve in his administration, that doesn't mean he wouldn't allow Muslims to serve in his administration.
Yesterday Cain made news again after saying that it is not the "government’s role, or anybody else’s role" to make the... MORE

During an interview with Piers Morgan on Wednesday, Herman Cain ignited controversy by stating that homosexuality is a choice and presenting an incoherent view on abortion: that he is against abortion rights but that “it’s not the government’s role or anybody else’s role to make that decision.” In the same interview, Cain also repeated his claim that he never said he’d ban Muslims in his administration if elected president:
Morgan: You got into hot water about the whole issue of Muslims in a potential cabinet.
Cain: Yes.
Morgan: And you have kind of flip-... MORE

Yesterday Bryan Fischer was asserting that Muslims were responsible for slavery in America, so it only stands to reason that it must have been Christians who were responsible for ultimately ending it.
And that is exactly what Fischer claimed on his radio show yesterday when he declared that it was the Religious Right/Tea Party that deserves all the credit for ending slavery in America:
MORE

It is becoming abundantly clear that we could never parody Bryan Fischer if we tried because he is constantly dreaming up absurd claims that we couldn't even begin to match in our wildest imagination.
On his radio program yesterday, Fischer was discussing his view that every voter must have a religious test for candidates running for office, which was prompted by the dust-up over Mitt Romney's Mormon faith at last week's Values Voter Summit.
During the discussion, Fischer defended Robert Jeffress' right to his "sincerely held religious belief" that Mormonism is a cult ... which then... MORE